


she lives in you

by Sanctuaria



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Catharsis, Episode: s03e13 That Hope Is You Part 2, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Philippa's telescope, no beta we die like philippa (prime), returned to its rightful owner, spoilers for the s3 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 16:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30142647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: Saru returns Captain Georgiou’s telescope, and Michael takes a moment alone to honor Philippa before taking command.
Relationships: Michael Burnham & Philippa Georgiou, Michael Burnham & Sylvia Tilly
Comments: 15
Kudos: 23





	she lives in you

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Opal, without whom this fic would probably still be languishing half-finished on my hard drive <3

Swathed in gray with a red stripe down her front and an oblong badge on her chest, Michael pulls at the sleeves of the new uniform and then rolls her shoulders, ensuring she still has full range of motion despite the snugness around the collar. Many of the others have already changed as well, she notes as she exits her quarters into the main hallways of the _Discovery_. Intellectually, Michael knows the corridors are emptier than feels normal, even after the amount of time she has spent in the future, a large ship for the sixty-eight souls who left everything behind to follow her into the unknown, but they fill it regardless with their enthusiasm and cheer, happy to be back onboard, to have their ship back, the one piece of familiar ground left to them.

Every step feels different, walking through these halls and corridors that she knows intimately—perhaps not as intimately as she had known every nook and cranny and spotty processor of the _Shenzhou_ after seven years of service there, two of which she spent as her Number One, but intimately all the same. She has cried here, bled here, died here many, many times in a time loop during the Klingon War.

A war that feels so far away now, though it had once loomed over her life like the largest shadow.

The old uniform pinched a bit under the arms, she thinks as she steps out of the turbolift, while this one feels more padded, heavier in the shoulders… She wonders if Philippa’s captain’s uniform was thicker there too, because of the gold. Regardless, whether that weight was extra fabric or the responsibilities of command, Captain Philippa Georgiou had borne it the best out of any captain Michael had ever known.

It had been Michael’s greatest honor to serve under her, to learn from her, to be mentored by her. She has known that from the day of Captain Georgiou’s death, at first cursing herself as Saru had cursed her for squandering it so, as Starfleet’s first and only mutineer. Nights awoken with T’Kuvma’s rumbling laugh in her ears or the look of disappointment on Philippa’s face painted behind her eyelids, and days where she tried to drown herself in her guilt and grief and self-loathing, only to find her body still rose again the next day and soldiered on. Even when she’d finally accepted that her most useful place of penance could in fact be serving on a starship instead of shut away in a cell, she held onto that hate, as she’d once held onto Philippa’s pride and joy. Only later, staring into the face of the woman she had once known, revered, and loved and seeing only coal-black hardness staring back at her did she fully come to realize how much of Philippa’s teachings remained with her still despite her court martial, as she tried to instill those same values into another version of her who appeared to have none.

And now…

As her original Philippa Georgiou had always believed, the captain’s chair awaits her, but it remains daunting in a different way than it had been for Tilly so few days ago. If Michael is honest with herself, she has avoided it thus far, whether by choice or instinct, preferring to stand for most of the time even when leading _Discovery_ on its mission to locate the seed ship or when escaping the _Viridian_. For all of its similarities, she does not want to know the differences between it and the familiar leather of the captain’s chair on the _Shenzhou_ , where she had spent hours under Philippa’s firm but warm tutelage, where she could feel the burr without even looking, spot the slightest discoloration on the arm panels where Philippa had tapped her fingers while thinking. She had always envisioned becoming Captain with Philippa’s reassurance behind her, just as she had stood at her shoulder the first few times Michael took the conn as a young officer—steady and out of sight, just beyond her field of vision but there in immediacy should she turn her head.

Her feet have brought her to the captain’s ready room—her ready room, now—and the doors whoosh open for her as she approaches, but Michael stops in the entryway, stock still. It’s not that he hadn’t said it would be here, it just…

His words, spoken soft but firm before his departure: “I should never have accepted it, and for that I am truly sorry. It was never what she would have wanted, even with how things came to their unfortunate end. It is yours, Michael, and it is rightfully returned to you.”

_Do you accept the last will and testament of Captain Philippa Georgiou?_

She approaches it with trembling fingers, brushing them over the burnished copper fastenings and the cold, smooth cylinder of the telescope’s main body. Not a speck of dust clings to the metal casing, upkept as pristine as her captain herself had. Her fingers seek the familiar contours of metal like the last drops of cool liquid in the desert, running along the sturdy legs of the tripod, the delicate hinges and bolts and the sheer proof that Philippa Georgiou had lived, and loved, and passed on. That there was one part of her legacy that Michael in her grief and her weakness hadn’t destroyed. A tear collects in her eye and she hurriedly steps backward to let it fall where it cannot mar this precious collection of lenses and mirrors, bound together into a whole with the kind of artisanal care a replicator could never emulate. The tear slips down her cheek and she sweeps it away with the back of her hand instead. The stars outside the large window glitter amongst the limitless black, and Michael comes to stand next to the telescope to gaze out toward them in the same direction it points, two fingers resting gently against the metal. The vastness has always called to her, an infinity that promised answers for those brave and bold enough to venture out into it and ask the questions. Her captain had recognized that in her from the very beginning, teaching her not only to look forward, but to look up.

_“My hope is that you will use it to continue to investigate the mysteries of the universe, both inside and out. And keep your eyes and heart open. Always.”_

“Can you see me now, Philippa?” Michael says softly. “Somewhere out there in the stars.”

The Vulcan part of her says it is not logical, but that part has grown quieter in the year and counting she’s spent in the future—the present, now, the 32nd century, and she wonders if Philippa would be proud of that too. She always had tried to bring out the more human side of Michael, instinct and emotions as facets as important for a Starfleet officer and for a sentient being as logic.

Seven years…

Three, since she lost her.

Three years and twenty-two thousand six hundred and eight souls sacrificed to the war she started.

Three years and twenty-two thousand six hundred and eight souls and it is still only the one that stabs her in the chest at night, a Klingon _mek’leth_ to the heart.

_“I’m sorry,”_ Michael would say, except she has said it so many times. Whispered in the dark with tear tracks down her face and her mouth open and gasping a tortured scream that just won’t come out, murmured like a mantra every day in her cell. Cried it, the night Sarek had returned her badge on behalf of Starfleet Command, clutching at it because how could she have back the living emblem of what Philippa had inspired within her when the woman herself was still gone, as good as by Michael’s hand?

Bile rises in her throat, hot and leaden as the grief still wrapped around her heart.

_I’m sorry I betrayed you._

_I’m sorry I betrayed Starfleet._

_I’m sorry I let a war start over you._

_I’m sorry I couldn’t save you._

Another tear falls. _I’m sorry you couldn’t be here to see this day._

The door chimes and Michael straightens immediately, as if her back had been anything less than straight, and blinks away any further liquid that has collected on her lashes, but it is only Tilly.

“We’re ready for you!” her roommate, friend, and now Number One says brightly. She peers at Michael, her brow furrowing. “If you’re ready, that is.” Her eyes fall to the telescope, then to the rest of the room where the rest of Saru’s things have been removed, leaving it standing alone on its tripod. She must recognize it, tentative toward each other as they had been back then, the cadet with her eyes set on a captain’s chair of her own and the mutineer whose loss of it was what she mourned the least. “Is that…”

“Yes,” Michael says, her voice low and controlled but somehow still fraught with emotion.

“Oh,” Tilly says, eyes wide. She steps closer, laying one hand on Michael’s arm. She can feel the warmth of human contact even through the fabric of the captain’s uniform, steady and undemanding. 

“She would have been proud of you, you know,” Tilly says after a moment. Tilly, with her uncanny ability to know the right things to say. “I mean, I didn’t know her, but, I know who she was and how important she was to you—and I know what you’re like, how important you would have been to her—”

Michael waits for the usual arguments to surface, that Philippa’s fondness and esteem only made Michael’s actions that much more heartless of a betrayal, but standing next to Philippa’s final gift, the thoughts don’t come.

“You told me,” Michael replies instead, and the soft smile she gives her speaks of remembrance, of friendships formed and tears shed and simpler times that were not necessarily happier but recalled with affection all the same. “You told me when we first met. You said you’d read everything there was to know about her in the logs.”

“Well, I did.” The Sylvia Tilly of back then might have blushed, and there’s something to be said for missing that Tilly, one who had seen far less war and death— _“battle is not a simulation, Michael, it’s blood and screams and funerals”_ —but the smile this one gives is just as wide. Michael shares it for another few moments, then turns back to the telescope.

“I’ll be right there. Just…give me another minute.”

The hand lifts, Tilly backing away. “Of course…Captain.”

_Captain_.

The door whooshes open and shut again as she exits, and Michael closes her eyes with the title still ringing in her ears.

_“I imagine you have your own command now. The captain of your own ship.”_

Philippa’s voice, those words she has had seared into her memory since that first time she heard it in her shared quarters, except now when it plays again it is more a balm than a burn. Michael’s fingers ghost along the body of the telescope once more and it is as if Philippa is standing beside her, looking on with warmth and approval and her ever-present faith in Michael’s ability to do good, the way Philippa had always inspired the best out of her crew.

And now, it is Michael’s turn.

_“Take good care. But more importantly, take good care of those in your care.”_

“I will, Philippa,” Michael vows to the open air, and opening her eyes once more to the stars out the window, glittering and full of hope and endless possibility. Finally, new words rise within her to replace those she’s said so many times before. “I promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all feedback appreciated <3
> 
> Update 3/25/21 because this would not get out of my head: now with [art](https://aleksandrachaev.tumblr.com/post/646673942496575488/i-imagine-you-have-your-own-command-now-the)!


End file.
